On 9 July the Commerce Department sent a 32-page letter
[1] to the
ICANN board and the House Commerce Committee, responding to
committee chairman Tom Bliley's questions on ICANN's recent actions
[2].
Here's the NY Times's coverage
[3] of this letter (free
registration and cookies required). Commerce Department officials said that
ICANN should

hold all meetings in public,

drop a proposed $1-per-domain-name fee until a permanent ICANN
board can vote on it, and

draw up binding contracts with domain-name services that would
bar ICANN from going beyond their mission.

Commerce did not let NSI entirely off the hook, either. While
chastising ICANN for a threat, issued in its Berlin meeting, to cancel
NSI's authority to issue domain names, the Commerce letter states
baldly that unless NSI signs ICANN's operating agreement, Commerce
will in fact terminate that authority. NSI must stop at once
claiming the .com, .net. and .org domain-name databases as their
intellectual property, Commerce insists.

Congress has now scheduled the investigative hearing promised by
Bliley. The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will
convene "Domain Name System Privatization: Is ICANN Out of Control?"
on Thursday, July 22, 1999 at 11:00 a.m. in the Rayburn House
Office Building, room 2322.

On 16 July Commerce again extended the deadline
[4] for the end of
the open domain registration test. The test had already been
extended once
[5] because of protracted wrangling among NSI, ICANN,
and the test registrars. The new target date for wider
participation in competitive registration is 6 August.

Cult of the Dead Cow strikes at Microsoft's heart

Back Orifice 2000 menaces NT, Win2000

As promised, the CdC has released Back Orifice 2000, the update to
Back Orifice
[6] that runs on Windows NT and the beta releases of
Windows 2000. The CdC gave away CD-ROMs containing the tool at the
7th DefCon hackers' convention on 10 July, but it took a few days
for the code to appear on its spiffy new Web site
[7]. (Much to
their embarassment, the CdC CD-ROMs were infected with the
Chernobyl virus. At this writing this embarassment is graphically on
display here
[8].) This time the hacker group is releasing, under
the GNU Public License, source code for their trojan-horse-in-
security-tool's-clothing. GPLing BO2K cuts both ways -- it
encourages development of variants and new features, but it provides
anti-virus writers a better chance to block the trojan. BO2K will
be harder to spot than its predecessor because it offers strong
encryption (via 3DES) and configurable ports. Here is a bulletin
from Internet Security Systems
[9] that details the operation of
BO2K and exhaustively lists its features and options. Most
anti-virus companies have already posted countermeasures for BO2K. But
not all believe
[10] that this trojan, which is likely to evolve
rapidly, will be seriously slowed by virus scanners, many of which
rely on simple pattern matching to detect a malware signature.

When you've tired of menacing, scary cows, relax at this site
[11]
dedicated to the decorated cows of Chicago. That city got the idea
from Zurich, which first obtained a herd of full-sized plastic cows,
turned them over to its artist community, and displayed the results
in public spaces.

In 1998 the US Congress enacted the Internet Tax Freedom Act
(summary
[12]), guaranteeing no federal, state, or local taxation of
Internet access or electronic commerce until October 2001. The same
law set up a 19-member National Advisory Commission on Electronic
Commerce
[13] to figure out what to do after that date. This
commission held its first meeting in June, 8 months late and mired in
controversy and politics
[14]. The meeting was told that in 1998
taxing authorities lost $210M in untaxed Internet commerce. But a
more recent Ernst & Young study estimated that in 1999 states will
lose only $170M, less than one-tenth of 1% of state and local tax
revenues. Further meetings are planned for September, December, and
March before the commission submits its recommendations in April
2000. One possible outcome could be a national sales tax on
Internet transactions. Here former presidential candiate Pete DuPont
elaborates some of the reasons he thinks this is a bad idea
[15].

Thanks to John Kristoff <jtk at aharp dot is-net dot depaul dot edu>
for the prod on this story.

Note added 1999-07-21:
Lots of new news has emerged on the subject of governments taxing (or regulating)
the Net:

On 16 July a Connecticut jury sided with Microsoft in the Bristol
Technology antitrust case
[16]. Bristol had claimed that Microsoft
broke the law by refusing to renew a key contract granting it access
to NT technology. The U.S. District Court jury found no violations
of antitrust laws in Microsoft's dealings with Bristol. However, the
jury did find that Microsoft had used deceptive practices in
violation of the state's Unfair Trade Practices Act, but awarded Bristol
just $1 in that claim. Bristol had asked for $263M. The case is
unlikely to affect the federal antitrust prosecution, but its outcome
could discourage other small companies from going after Microsoft in
court.

A judge from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled
[17] that
sending unsolicited commercial email violates "Netiquette" --
generally accepted Internet practices -- and that service providers
requiring subscribers to follow such practices are justified in
shutting off spammers' accounts. The ruling came in a suit brought
by a spammer against an ISP who had done just that. Thanks go to
Sheehan Carter <sheehan dot carter at crtc dot gc dot ca> of the
CTRC for first word on this story.

An Austrian legislative body has passed a spam ban
[18] far stricter
than required under EU rules. (Babelfish
[19] will give you only a
rough sense of this German article.) The EU guidelines mandate only
that spam be appropriately labeled in its subject line and that
spammers honor user requests to remove their addresses (opt-out).
The Austrian parliament's law committee passed instead a tough law
based on the opt-in principle: commercial email would be outlawed
unless a commercial relationship with the recipient already exists.
The law spells out high fines for offences.

Following weeks of wrangling between consumer advocates, government
and industry, a parliamentary justice committee has passed an
amendment to the telecommunications law. Commercial e-mail will only
be allowed if the recipient has previously agreed to it (opt-in
principle). Stiff fines are spelled out for offenses.

The new law goes well beyond the existing EU directive, which bans
spam that is not appropriately labelled and protects consumers who
have clearly stated they do not wish to receive commercial e-mail,
for example by putting their names on a "Robinson list" (opt-out
principle).

Web Review features an excellent summary
[20] of XHTML, a cleaner and
stricter version of HTML that will eventually help put an end to
HTML smudging
[21]. The language will be interpretable by applications
that are far smaller than the bloated browsers of today, which must
cope with the many idiosyncrasies of HTML and its many
implementations. The W3C cites estimates that by 2002 as many as 75% of all
HTTP requests may be made by devices other than browsers: telephones,
PDAs, toasters, doorknobs, etc.

This summary, quoted from
[20], explains how XHTML fits with the Web
acronyms you already know.

HTML is a markup language described in SGML (Standard Generalized
Markup Language).

XML is a restricted form of SGML, removing many of SGML's more
complex features, but preserving most of SGML's power and
commonly used features.

XHTML is the reformulation of HTML 4.0 as an application of XML.

Among the differences between XHTML and HTML 4.0:

All tags must be lowercase.

All elements, including empty ones, must be terminated -- for
example: <p></p>, <br />.

A simple bug in Internet Explorer 4 wastes gigabytes of bandwidth
per day, according to this BrowserWatch story
[22]. Servers that
dynamically generate pages -- for example search sites -- can flag
them with a do-not-cache directive, <meta http-equiv="pragma"
content="nocache">. Most browsers know that it's OK to cache any
(presumably static) graphics on such a page; but not IE4. The
proprietor of AbsoluteChat.com, writing for BrowserWatch, claims that
this bug has caused his site to serve 18 gigabytes of unnecessary
data over the past month. He implores Microsoft to patch this
wasteful bug. Personally I believe it's blood under the bridge. How many
users who have gotten IE4 working stably would take the trouble to
download and reinstall this huge and troublesome piece of software,
when IE5 is already out? We're stuck with the bug and its attendant
waste for many months to come, until IE4 fades into memory.

This Lucent press release
[24] describes a 2.5 Gb/s networking
technology, called WaveStar OpticAir, carried on a laser beam in the
open air. The maximum range is 5 km. The product will be available
in the first quarter of next year, with a 10 Gb/s multiplexed
version following in the summer. Lucent claims the technology requires
no spectrum license to operate and meets environmental safety
regulations:

Unlike the tiny, high-density streams of light emitted by laser
pointers, Lucent's WaveStar OpticAir system will use
"expanded-beam" lasers.

Here's a diagram
[25] of a representative network. The product spec
page
[26] has a bit more detail, but I was unable to discover the
operating frequency of WaveStar OpticAir.

Note added 1999-07-19:
An anonymous reader sent additional details of the Lucent system, including the
photograph above depicting one end of a WaveStar OpticAir link. Other factoids
include:

Wavelength. WaveStar OpticAir operates in the range
from 1545 nm to 1565 nm. This is in the "optical infrared" --
the beam can't be seen with the naked eye.

Beam size. At the transmitting telescope the beam's
diameter is about 1/5 m; after 2 km it has spread to about 1 m.

Alignment. Each end of the link features an automatic
tracking system to keep the telescopes aligned.

Effects of weather. A rule of thumb is that the system
will operate over a distance of 1 to 1-1/2 times the
visibility distance reported in a weather forecast.

Mounting. The WaveStar OpticAir telescope, in its
weatherproof housing, is meant to be installed outdoors (for
example on a rooftop) and anchored in cement. A fiber run of
up to 300 m connects it with the rack-mounted components that
perform the multiplexing and A-to-D.

On July 1, GIMPS announced
[27] discovery of the 38th Mersenne prime:
26,972,593 - 1. This number has over two million decimal digits
and won for its discoverer, Nayan Hajratwala, the first of the EFF's
Cooperative Computing Awards
[28]: $50,000 for the first prime with
more than a million digits. (Hajratwala can claim the award when the
results are published in a refereed academic journal.)

The next Mersenne prime discovered may qualify for the follow-on EFF
prize of $100,000 for a 10-million-digit prime.

Lest we imagine that our own century invented clueless politicians
mucking about with technology they don't understand, consider these
two data points from the last century.

Bill Thornton <x at he dot net> sent this link
[33] to a debate in
the 28th Congress of 1845. It was proposed to spend $100,000 on a
telegraph line between Baltimore and New York. The question arose
as an amendment to a bill to appropriate a smaller sum to maintain
an existing line between Washington and Baltimore. Senator George
McDuffie raised the following objection:

What was this telegraph to do? Would it transmit letters and
newspapers? Under what power in the constitution did Senators
propose to erect this telegraph? He was not aware of any
authority except under the clause for the establishment of post
roads. And besides the telegraph might be made very
mischievous, and secret information after communicated to the
prejudice of merchants.

It's doubtful whether Senator McDuffie was concerned with encrypted
information -- doubtless merely sending it over the new and arcane
medium of the telegraph was sufficient to render it secret.

Let us close with the widely quoted plaint of Charles Babbage as
he struggled with Parliamentary funding for the Analytical Engine.

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament],
"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures,
will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to
apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke
such a question.